If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Original drawings by Iain M. Banks, author of the hugely popular Culture novels, will be included in a book that celebrates the author’s vision of the Culture universe. The previously unseen drawings, most of which are annotated by the author, and many of which predate the writing of the novels themselves, will be curated by the Estate of Iain M. Banks and Iain’s life-long friend and science fiction writer Ken MacLeod. With additional commentary by MacLeod, further notes on the Culture, and extracts from the Culture novels, the book will provide a unique insight into the Culture, including its history, language, technology, philosophy and values.

Orbit acquired world rights through literary agent Mic Cheetham and will publish in 2019 with simultaneous publication in the UK and US.

We’re thrilled that the Estate has given us permission to publish the collection, and that owing to special circumstances Ken MacLeod has agreed to join the team working on it.

Culture ships are not sleek and sexy. The drawings that were published in a fanzine about 20 years ago show this. The more interesting stuff are the maps from The Wasp Factory and Against a Dark Background. Hopefully there are some Culture maps somewhere.

There are also some unpublished short stories from the late 1970s (maybe early 1980s) although he may have reused some of those plotlines in later books. It would also be nice to see the planning documents like the ones that were in the App. Finally I would like to see Iain's "Culture Notes" document that he used to try and not be inconsistent between books.

Due to be released next year, it will feature a host of previously unknown drawings, sketches and maps that were discovered in the writer’s files by Adele Hartley, his widow. Many are said to be annotated by the author and pre-date the writing of the 10 “space opera” novels, which were published over 25 years.

MacLeod said: “Adele found a considerable number of drawings, many with annotation, that Iain had made which illustrated the Culture. She showed them to me and said she felt it would be a shame if they weren’t published. “He had worked out the Culture universe in considerable details and it’s really interesting to see the consistency in how everything unfolds from the cosmology of the universe to the technology that is feasibile in it. There’s a remarkable coherence to the whole thing.

“The final form of the book has still to be worked out, but extracts of the Culture novels will be integrated with the drawings, some of Iain’s own writing on them and my own commentary."

“I knew that Iain had done some drawings – I saw them way back in the 1970s, so I knew they existed,” said MacLeod. “But I didn’t know quite how many there were. It was Adele Hartley [Banks’s wife] who found them. Iain was a very organised writer and a very organised person … Many of them are very clearly labelled, but there are one or two that you need to have read all of the books to see what they’re about. We sifted through them together.”

The previously unseen images are a mix of drawings, maps and sketches. MacLeod described them as “very carefully drawn” and “the first imaginings of the Culture universe”, ranging from ships to planet designs.

“Iain used them in his own world-building – as he designed the Culture universe,” he said. “They were also a very convenient aide memoire to him, I would imagine. One of the things I find in writing space opera is that it is incredibly annoying to have to flick back through a manuscript to see how fast a particular spacecraft can go, or the size of a particular planet.”

MacLeod is embarking on a reread of all of the Culture novels in order to pull the book together. “I’m particularly struck with how he has a consistent imaginary physics which enables all these types of faster-than-light travel, for example,” he said. “The pictures would have helped with that consistency.”

MacLeod said working with his old friend’s papers was an emotional experience. “I read all of the early novels in manuscript. It’s quite moving for me to revisit them. There is a real pleasure in it – I’ve read and reread them over the years, but this is, for me, going to be a close rereading all at one go, and then relating passages in them to the drawings.”